All writing falls within certain conventions of genre. A memo, scholarly essay, report, reflection or other piece of prose are all governed by conventions that inform their structure. For the purposes of this invention, we will consider two main categories of writing: business and scholarly. The logical progression and organizational structure of business and/or scholarly writing can take many forms. Understanding how the movement of thought is managed through a piece of writing has a profound impact on its overall cogency and ability to impress and convince.
However, today, successful written communication is waning. A comprehensive report co-authored by the Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and the Society for Human Resource Management found that when it comes to written communication, “80.9 percent of employer respondents report high school graduate entrants as ‘deficient.’ More than half (52.7 percent) say Written Communications, which includes writing memos, letters, complex reports clearly and effectively, ‘very important’ for high school graduates' successful job performance.” Written communication is “very important,” yet a majority of students and workers are “deficient” when it comes to performing well in written tasks.
Amongst the factors leading to this are: decreasing use of a variety of written forms in class and within homework, information overflow students face when searching using the Internet, inadequate instruction, and various writing pathologies and anxieties. The leap from writing a few sentences to drafting and refining a structured essay with the required elements is massive and one that today's students—both domestic and international—are left to make blindly, contributing to the US cost of $3.7 billion/year to offer remedial courses to get post-secondary students up to the appropriate level and US businesses another $3.1 billion/year to provide additional writing support and education to salaried employees.
Whilst within the prior art there are a significant number of patents relating to cognitive memory techniques for the student or user to aid memorization and recall of factual information, technologies for brain-storming or mind-mapping ideas, and tools for content search and acquisition, techniques for provisioning interactive, context-specific writing frameworks for essays and other forms of structured content are lacking. Similarly, within word processing tools and search engines etc. the overwhelming prior art with respect to templates relates to standardized templates such as letter, envelope, fax cover letter, etc. Even here these templates fail as the first time user may well understand that the fields marked address, name, date etc. require completion but that large blank space after “Dear XX” is still a void without guidance on structure or interactivity in terms of real-time prompts and guidance particular to a given context or genre.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to provide students and other users with interactive, context-specific writing frameworks that, once the content type and the context have been established, presents a framework that allows students or other users to enter the required content in a structured, contextually-defined, interactive manner in real time as they establish individual facts, arguments, counterpoints etc.
Other aspects and features of the present invention will become apparent to those ordinarily skilled in the art upon review of the following description of specific embodiments of the invention in conjunction with the accompanying figures.